Arkansas Business

This story is from the archives of ArkansasSports360.com.

Rob Keys of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal recently pondered in a column if attendance at Bud Walton Arena is down enough to impact John Pelphrey’s job security.

Each year since Pelphrey arrived, crowd sizes have dipped. Keys pointed out that through the Razorbacks’ first 10 home games of 2011, the 19,000-seat arena was at barely “58-percent of capacity” in terms of tickets sold.

Keys, a veteran writer on sports and business, went on to explain:

Actual attendance is even worse. Using the estimated totals released by the University of Arkansas, the actual number of fannies in seats is less than 6,400 per game (about 33 percent of capacity).

… And when those cash-generating suites are available for practically every remaining game, the bottom line isn't perfectly healthy. It's one thing to have some empty cheap seats, but another to have the ones built to hold big-dollar donors and corporate sponsors collecting dust.

In the end, those losses might prove Pelphrey's most costly.

How costly? We're beginning to get a glimpse financially.

Matt Jones of Whole Hog Sports estimates in a blog post that the UA is losing approximately $2 million this year because of unsold tickets. And, as the post points out, that isn't even the beginning of the bad news for the UA.

Consider that the figure doesn’t take into account the luxury suites unsold, the lost concessions and the memorabilia left on shelves. As I reported in Arkansas Business earlier this year the UA was projecting nearly $500,000 in lost basketbal revenue compared to 2009-10.

It appears those losses will be even more substantial. For an athletic department that needs money for a new football facility, an assortment of other projects and substantial financial bonuses for athletic director Jeff Long and other UA staffers, you wonder how much longer the prospect of losing millions on basketball will be OK.